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Adele Had Us Long Before “Hello”

Adele Had Us Long Before “Hello”

Those of you who are regular readers of Vogue know that one of the things we’re keen on is placing fashion within the context of the cultural and societal factors that can shape it in profound and meaningful ways.

Something seismic has clearly been happening these last six months, if what we saw at the spring 2016 collections is anything to go by. The word we kept coming back to after those shows was disruption, and in “The Great Disruption” (page 457) you can discover the designers both established and new who are upending the industry, not to mention our closets, with their exciting, break-all-the-rules visions of how things should look and be .

The portfolio accompanying Sarah Mower’s story also allowed us to photograph a few swaggeringly cool characters whom you might not necessarily expect to see in the pages of Vogue, and that is a good thing; after all, if we didn’t disrupt ourselves a little, then what would be the point?

Fashion is, like everything else in the world today, in the midst of what President Obama, in his last State of the Union address, called “extraordinary change.” His speech encapsulated everything that has made his presidency so inspiring, dynamic, and impactful, characterized by leadership that has been wonderfully courageous and deeply empathetic, and I want to take this opportunity to thank him for all of the advances that he and his administration have achieved these past eight years.

Of course, with 2016 being an election year, it carries the promise of all sorts of change. Personally, though, I’d like to go against the grain and say that what I am hoping for, post-election, is instead a sense of stability and constancy, of bravely staying the course, especially when one considers all that we are faced with at the moment: women’s rights challenged, global terrorism, the refugee crisis, racial inequality and oppression, and the need for gun control.